The Topic Page Redesign

Happy Thursday, folks! Today we released a pretty significant design update to the HubPages Topic Page. There’s more coming soon, however, we’re excited to share the work we’ve done so far. I encourage all of you to head over to the new homepage (which is now accessible to signed in users!) to see for yourselves, but I’ll give you the full rundown of the changes here:

The new reader-centric homepage is now the main Topic page and it is accessible to both signed in and signed out visitors.

All Topic pages (including the homepage) offer three content listings: Latest (default view), Best, and Hot. Some of you might remember this. 🙂

Signed in Hubbers see a blended content list that includes Hubs, Questions, and Discussions. Signed out visitors see Hubs only.

All HubPages readers now have access to fresh content on HubPages.

Navigation on the new Topic pages is consistent with Hubs: the right sidebar contains the list of subtopics that can be expanded.

Each content listing item contains a brand new category heading that is clickable. We are more heavily promoting categories to illustrate the breadth and depth of content on HubPages.

Each content listing has been updated to include the publication date. Author follower count was removed. Thumbnail images are 125% larger.

The breadcrumb structure has greater consistency with Hubs, and “explore” was replaced with “HubPages”.

The paragraph descriptions at the top of every Topic page were removed.

What are the benefits of this redesign?

There are a number of important benefits to this update. Most notably, improved site navigation and structure (the underlying HTML) should yield traffic and SEO benefits over the long term. To elaborate, the structural changes we’ve made should augment our credibility with Google and hopefully result in improved visibility in SERPs. If you’d like to learn more about this, Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a great starting point. Second, readers can easily discover the latest and greatest content published on HubPages with improved navigation and usability.

Wait, but how do I get to the Feed?

You can access the Feed via the explore menu in the header or by going there directly. Clicking on the HubPages in the header and in breadcrumbs will bring you to the new homepage.
Lastly, we think the following quote from Google’s SEO Guide elucidates our goals and motivations for doing this work:

“Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. “